


Dancing in the Dark

by WriterTrash56



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Crying, Dancing, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Laboratories, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Slow Dancing, Starblaster - Freeform, Stolen Moments, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, she doesnt know that yet but my girl loves that bluejeans man, she just loves him ok, this was meant to be short but here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 04:57:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18844090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriterTrash56/pseuds/WriterTrash56
Summary: Emotions were never Lup’s forte. Which was ironic, considering the fact that the Starblaster ran on the crew’s bonds and emotions and basic fucking empathy.She didn’t like to think about what she felt. There was only the grind of each and every day on the ship, searching, finding, discovering, and eventually, fighting. There was the death that only lasted a year at most, and the constant worry of the Hunger attacking even when they knew they had time, and the uncertainty of each plane Davenport crossed them into.There were reasons she didn’t like confronting her emotions. If she let them all get to her, if she let down her emotional walls at all, the force of her fucked up life would kill her, and she wasn’t even sure that was a figurative statement.





	Dancing in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I got possessed by the writing demon and now I have this. I hope you like it as much as my sleep deprived brain does, because this is like 2000 words or whatever and this is the most I've written in six months. Dang, man, I should write some more. Anyway, enjoy the fic. Your kudos are like flowers and your comments are like rain on a hot day, which is to say that both are really fucking awesome and I hope you do both of those things. Send some rain my way. My plants need watered.

Emotions were never Lup’s forte. Which was ironic, considering the fact that the Starblaster ran on the crew’s bonds and emotions and basic fucking empathy. Though Lup was as skilled of a scientist as the rest of them, even the mysteries of the bond engine were beyond her capacity. 

She didn’t like to think about what she felt. There was only the grind of each and every day on the ship, searching, finding, discovering, and eventually, fighting. There was the death that only lasted a year at most, and the constant worry of the Hunger attacking even when they knew they had time, and the uncertainty of each plane Davenport crossed them into. 

One year Magnus died of breathing in painful spores. There was the other year when Lucretia died when a high out of his mind cave troll stabbed her after she tried to take the Light out of his cave. Taako once died after being blasted by magic so intense his skin burned off in layers like an onion. There were other times when the deaths were accidental, clumsy mistakes and bad decisions, or the Hunger finishing a few of them off at the end of the year. So many deaths, and the seven of them had to keep going, cycle after cycle, or all would be lost. 

There were reasons she didn’t like confronting her emotions. If she let them all get to her, if she let down her emotional walls at all, the force of her fucked up life would kill her, and she wasn’t even sure that was a figurative statement. 

So she smiled. So she joked. So she put on her devil-may-care attitude each day and hoped nobody would ever look under the surface. So that they wouldn’t notice the cracks. 

 

Lup stood out on the deck of the Starblaster, as she always did, and looked out at the vast, inky sea of stars. Tonight, she was on watch, a job she never particularly enjoyed. Elves didn’t need to sleep, technically she could stay up for three months without ever having to close her eyes. She liked to sleep, that’s the thing. She liked the escape. She liked not having to think. After getting so used to sleeping every couple of nights, she found herself slipping. 

Everyone else was either sleeping or pretending to sleep. Or working. The Light still hadn’t been found, and since they missed the streak overhead due to the constant soupy weather of this world. Barry was developing new sensing technology in the Starblaster’s lab for the Light. She knew he pulled some sleepless nights working on the damn thing. 

She yawned. This watch wasn’t going to do shit, she decided. The Hunger wasn’t coming for another few months anyway, so why worry about that? The small civilization down below, surprisingly warlike despite it only having like a population of 7,000, was too far away to worry about air strikes. Maybe she could annoy Barry into letting her work with him on his project. Or convince the damn nerd to sleep. Both options sounded agreeable. 

As she neared the lab, she found her heart starting to beat faster and faster the closer she got. A feeling like nervousness started to buzz through her body. She started to walk faster. She didn’t like this feeling. She didn’t know where it came from. But it had to do something with the lab. 

She had had this feeling before, around Barry. No, no, this couldn’t be about Barry, she thought. The two of them were nothing more than friends. Nothing. More. 

Why did those thoughts sound false, even to her own head?

She pushed them aside. She didn’t want to deal with those, not now. So she pushed them down into the back corner of her brain where she pushed all other unwanted thoughts. 

The door slid open in front of her. She found herself checking her hair before abandoning the effort. In the messy bun it was currently tied into, there was no saving it. 

The lights were on, illuminating the lab in an almost blue light. The lights were sterile, but the rest of the room was the furthest thing from that. Tools and books were strewn in haphazard piles on the counters, along with loose sheets of paper with notes scribbled in any available space. Paper was precious on the Starblaster, and they had to use everything to its fullest extent possible. Her eyes traveled over the work lights hovering over petri dishes and spare robotics until she found Barry, hunched over a worktable with his back turned to her. She could hear him muttering to himself from here. 

She came up next to him silently. She always had a certain grace about her, something that allowed her to walk without being heard. 

Barry’s face was screwed up in concentration, his brows furrowed together. A pen hung out of the side of his mouth. In one hand he held a bizarre collection of wires and crystals connected to a metal piece that blinked intermittently, and in the other, he wrote down various notes as his gaze flicked back to whatever the hell was in his hand. 

She tapped his shoulder. “Sup, Barold.” 

Barry gave a loud chirp of alarm and spun around at the contact before focusing on her. He relaxed a little and gave a little smile. “Oh, hello, Lup.” The pen fell out of his mouth. He scrambled to catch it before it fell to the floor. Lup caught it in one smooth motion before it hit the ground. 

She held it out to him. “Late night, huh?” 

“Uh, yeah,” He gestured to the unfathomable object in his hand. “Light stuff. You know.” Lup noticed heavy bags under his eyes. She wondered how long it had been since he had slept. 

“Yeah,” She agreed. “Light stuff.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on watch?” He asked. He rubbed at his face. 

“Yes, technically. But I got bored and your lab, well, is just the party town of the Starblaster. Big time. Got any coffee?” Lup said. She leaned against the counter. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Barry pointed over to a fantasy coffeemaker shoved up in the corner. His voice dripped with exhaustion. “Get me a cup, will you? Please?”

“No problem,  _ compadre.  _ Two cups of the best bean water in town coming right the hell up, my man.” She finger gunned him before busying herself with grabbing cups out of the cupboard. 

She set a cup in front of him. He took it gratefully and took a sip. She took a sip too, but she didn’t really need it. 

“Wanna take a break?” She asked. “You’ve been at this for a while.”

He waved her off. “No, no. I’ve still got so much to do, you know? No time for sleep, not for me.”

“You’re going to work yourself to death.” Lup remarked before taking a sip. He made a face. Then he shrugged. 

“That would be a first. Usually I just do stupid shit and then I get zapped.” He mimed an explosion. “Like the time I put the Light of Creation in the microwave.”

“You didn’t die though.” Lup said. “You just learned that the Light reacts very terribly to microwaves and that just because the question exists you don’t have to test it.”

“It was Maggie’s idea.” Barry mumbled. He yawned. “I should get back to work.” 

“No, no. You’re talking to me now.” She pushed the tools out of the way and plopped onto the counter beside him. 

He made a small noise of protest. Nevertheless, he relaxed in his chair. 

They lulled into a comfortable silence. Barry began shuffling through a drawer underneath his seat. 

“What do you miss most about the world?” Barry asked, out of the blue. “Our world, I mean.”

Lup sat back a little on the counter. It had been a long time since she had thought their old world. It was one of those things she never afforded herself the luxury of thinking of for more than a second. She remembered the hunger she had felt with Taako when it had just been the two of them on the road. She remembered the caravans they cooked and cleaned for and the aunt she had only known for a few months before she had died. She remembered the Queen Anne’s Plague that had nearly taken her life when she was seven, before the IPRE had perfected and distributed their cure to the entire population. 

But as she looked through her long memory, she remembered… good things. Halvoon berries drizzled with honey. The twin suns setting over a fiery purple sky. Seeing her first rocket launch at the IPRE and deciding that she and Taako were going to go up there too and see her world from far above. That had been before the Light had fallen into their world, when IPRE would send astronauts into orbit around their planet. 

Before everything had been consumed. 

There were too many things she missed. Too many things she hadn’t spared a thought to until now, sitting up at three am with Barry fucking Bluejeans. 

She shrugged. She felt a lump in her throat forming and she tried to swallow it down, tried to keep her emotional barriers steady. She was Lup, an acclaimed scientist, a master evocation wizard, a beautiful, fiery woman who didn’t have time for sadness. She didn’t have time to cry. 

“I miss the music most,” Barry said. He held a fantasy CD between his fingers. She didn’t realize he had picked anything up. “I miss how beautiful it sounded. My favorite singer was Celenius Calloway.”

Lup just nodded. She didn’t feel like talking or else she felt as if she would start crying. She remembered dancing to Celenius on the fantasy radio, trying to sing just as good as her. At the time, she had wanted to be a bard, to sing in front of crowds. She would dance to the songs like she was dancing with someone else, modeling a broomstick sometimes for a dance partner. Lup hadn’t danced in years. 

“I had brought these for the original mission.” Barry said. “I had to beg Davenport to let me carry on a CD player. Of course, I thought that this wouldn’t be a long mission. Not… not like this. Do you want me to play it?”

“Sure.” Lup croaked. “Whatever you want.”

Barry looked at her, concerned. “Lup, are you all right?” 

She waved him off. “No, no, I’m fine, Barold.”  _ Put the confidence back in place. Don’t let the mask slip.  _

Barry bounded over to the other side of the lab, stepping over papers as he went. He popped in the CD and waited for the music to play. 

The first notes floated in the room. Lup’s breath caught in her throat. 

_ “Should I wait until the winter’s morn? _

_ To dance so sweetly with you under the blossom tree _

_ To let our feet dance through the petals _

_ Not a care for how the world feels for our song _

_ Only that we’re here together _

_ With you  _

_ With you---” _

 

This had been her favorite song as a kid. And it reminded her too much, too terribly of home, a place she could never truly go back to, ever again. 

Barry held out a hand. His face was flushed red all of the way down his neck. 

“Dance with me?” 

Fuck, his eyes were so soft, and his smile was so… gentle. Something inside her shifted. Lup glided over to him wordlessly, taking his calloused, human hand into her slender elven one. The lump in her throat was starting to hurt. The effort to not show weakness in front of him was taking up most of her energy. 

He took the other one, and the two of them began to softly sway around the lab, stepping over notes and pens and spare tools. He hummed the tune under his breath, his eyes alight with stars Lup had never beheld before. That nervous feeling was back again, thrumming through her body with each heartbeat. She had never appreciated how beautiful Barry was.

These new feelings scared her. They made her want to cry more. More thoughts, ones of their shared homeworld, of the deaths, of their sacrifices for their mission, of the dark sadness she tried so hard not to show flooded into her brain. Somehow Barry had unlocked some part of herself she refused to acknowledge, and now they tumbled through her skull like stones.

He held his arm out for a spin, and she twirled out. She bit her lip.

When she pulled back in, he smiled. “Are you having fun?”

She felt her walls crumble. Those four words, and she could barely breathe. She couldn’t keep them up any longer. Lup was tired. She was so, so tired. 

She felt her face crumple into a sob. Fuck, she couldn’t help it. Hot tears started streaming down her face, and she tried to push them away, turn away, fruitlessly trying to not let Barry see. 

“Lup, uh, I-I uh, was it something I said? Did I do something?”

She sobbed again, harder this time. “No. No-no, you didn’t, didn’t do anything, Barold. You didn’t do-do anything.” And as hard as she tried not to, she remembered. 

All that death. She remembered her own now, tens of them. The poison that had left her screaming for three days. The time she fell off the deck of the Starblaster and plummeted thousands of miles to her death. The time she drowned in a mermaid’s tank. All of the stabbings, the searing pains of knives going through her chest and back. Music so low it stopped her heart. Magickal fire burning her from the inside out. Death, death, death. So cold it clung to the skin. Floating in an empty abyss for what felt like hours but was actually months, months without her friends. Seething. Itching to get out of the Astral Plane, her loneliness so absolute she almost dissolved. She thought she would see her friends there if they died too. She never did, not once. The Astral Plane was so large that you could swim a thousand miles and never see a soul. 

Taako, when he died, she would be without her rock, her grounding to this goddamn ship. She was more reckless without him. The years he died, she always took too big of risks, risks Magnus would never dream of taking. She died those years too, sometimes, and then Barry would be alone. She would leave everyone. How was that fair to them? How was that fair to her?

She cried. She cried so hard she crumpled to the floor. She cried for each death, for each world they couldn’t save.She cried to Lucretia, for Magnus, for Merle, for her Captain, for Taako, and for Barry, who sat beside her on the floor she sobbed on and rubbed gentle circles into her back, like he had done for the rest of them when their emotions got to be too much for them. She cried for Celenius Calloway, who would never sing again. She cried for this song that reminded her too much of home. And she cried for Barry, too, who sat beside her and rubbed gentle circles into her back, the only thing that kept her from going into hysterics. 

 

“ _ When it smells like summer, and the roses are red _

_ You know it will be okay, dear _

_ You know you’ll be out of the clouds soon--”  _

 

“It’s alright, it’s okay,” Barry murmured. “You’re going to be okay. I don’t know why you’re crying, but we can figure this out. Okay?”

Lup took in a shuddering breath. Tears clung to her cheeks and chin, and she knew she had snot bubbles coming out of her nose. In this moment, this filthy, tear stained moment, she didn’t care. 

She focused on his hand on her back. He had never touched her like this before. She found that she liked it. She focused on that. 

A warm, fuzzy feeling wrapped itself around her heart, breaking through her tears. And she found it had to do with Barry beside her. And for a moment, without knowing why, she wondered if he felt it too.


End file.
